Google and the World Brain Page #5

that's hard to do.

It's hard to finish.

It's hard to publish.

It's a certain achievement of scale,

it's a declaration of this is

what my life has learned,

this is what I can offer.

And that is not something

that can be dissected

and the little minced pieces

simply can't mean the same thing.

The lawsuits were commenced

in the fall of 2005

and, within six months,

The Authors Guild and the publishers

came to Google

with a proposal about

settling the lawsuit.

I was sitting innocently in my office

and a lawyer for the university

appeared and he said,

"You are about to take

a non-disclosure oath."

Well, I'd never had anything

to do with lawyers,

except once in my life

when I made a will and I thought,

"Um, I'm in deep water now.

What is this all about?"

Well, it turned out that

there were secret negotiations

between Google, on the one hand,

and The Authors Guild and The

Association of American Publishers

on the other.

They were suing Google

for infringement of copyright

and, as happens frequently

with suits,

they began to negotiate a settlement.

Well, we were not part of that

at Harvard.

However, we had to be informed

about it because we had the books.

It took three years to work it out,

because there were a lot of issues

to be discussed.

There were publishers at the table

as well as authors.

And publishers and authors

did not have identical interests.

There were libraries, not at the

table, but very much in the picture.

They were talking to Google

away from the room.

And I'm not sure how much I can say.

I definitely cannot talk

specifically about the negotiations

because I signed a non-disclosure

agreement,

which I'm told is still in force,

and I don't want to go to jail.

Google's long-running legal battle

with the US publishing industry

came to an unexpected halt

this morning

as the parties announced

a settlement

that would see both sides cooperate

on online access

to copyrighted books.

Google have agreed to pay

125 million in the settlement.

35.5 million of that sum

will go towards the establishment

of a rights collecting body

for digital books.

$45 millions has been set aside

to compensate writers

whose copyrighted books

Google has already scanned.

They will get around $60 per book.

The largest portion of the

settlement, $45.5 million,

will go just on the legal fees.

But the most striking aspect

of the agreement

is that it turns Google into a book

seller, selling online access

to out-of-print but

still-in-copyright works.

For those of you who don't know the

details of the settlement agreement,

it's 385 pages,

it has 46 sections of definitions,

it's got 15 sections

on Google's obligations,

it's got nine sections

on the economic terms,

it's got six sections

on libraries' obligations.

So this is not a little three-or-four

page memorandum of understanding

that we are talking about here.

This is a very heavily-negotiated

agreement.

So how many people have not

read the 334 pages?

CHUCKLING:

OK.

We proposed something that was

a little bit outside the box

and that was - if money

is being made,

share the money with

the rights holders.

It couldn't be simpler.

So I thought it would be pretty

non-controversial.

That apparently was naive of me.

I personally became increasingly

disenchanted

with what originally

looked like a great idea.

They basically transformed

the search service

into a gigantic commercial

enterprise.

They really thought they would

digitise every book in existence

and make it available,

for a price, everywhere.

The settlement would allow Google

to have essentially a licence

to commercialize all books

that are out of print.

There were certainly

hundreds of thousands

and probably millions of books,

for whom, even if they were

in copyright,

no author, no publisher,

no rights holder would come forward.

And those books are orphans

and Google would be able

to commercialize those

and nobody else would.

A monopoly was being created,

a monopoly of access to knowledge.

Did we want the greatest library

that would ever exist

to be in the hands

of one giant corporation,

which could really charge almost

anything it wanted for access to it?

It's not a library, it's a bookstore

and, you know, sell it

as a bookstore, if you want,

but don't pretend

that it's a library.

When I talk to people

in the publishing industry,

they find it humorous cos

it's like, "Well, they're orphan

for a reason..."

CHUCKLING:

And that in fact if we suddenly

found this goldmine

where the future of the book

are the orphan books... Yeah.

..OK, then, boy, those publishers

sure aren't very smart.

Our principal concern here today

in this discussion

is that, under the proposed

settlement,

Google would be the only entity

that could treat copyright

as an opt-out mechanism.

Everyone else would have to treat it

as opt-in.

There are other problems

with this proposed settlement.

Listed below are various potential

revenue streams for Google

as identified within

the settlement -

institutional subscriptions,

consumer purchases, advertising

uses, public access service,

print-on-demand, custom publishing,

PDF downloads,

consumer subscription model,

summaries, abstracts,

compilations of books.

That's what you are going

to end up with at a minimum.

What I'm saying to you, Mr Drummond,

does this, in fact, place Google

at such a tremendous advantage

in disregard of what has been

historically copyright law?

How do you respond

to those concerns?

As of today, we have zero market

share in any sort of books,

so we're a new entrant

to the market.

So far from being someone

who's controlling the market,

we're not even in it yet

and we're trying to get in there.

They thought, "All we have to do is

kind of announce this to the world

"and the world will go,

'God, what a great agreement!'"

And, for a while, some people did.

But then, you started reading

the agreement really carefully

and there were lots of questions.

The problem was there was nothing

in the agreement

that respected the privacy

of the people

who were looking at the books.

Google was going to be keeping track

of who exactly was reading

that book,

how long they were reading it

and what they read next.

That information could get back

to the government,

could get back to the FBI,

could get back to the police,

could get back to their employer.

Because Google wasn't making

any kind of guarantees

about what they were going to do

in respect of this privacy.

If people find that the privacy

policies of a particular technology

are not to their liking,

they should unplug it.

They should retreat

from the Internet.

They should cut off

their phone lines

and they should go up

and hide in a mountain.

They have that choice.

Well's conception

of the World Brain was that

it was intended to have a power

of surveillance over mankind -

information gathered

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